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"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

This patch brings forth a unique feature, an archeology quest into the depth and the past of Towns – The bury system.

What is this system all about?The bury system is a feature that enables players to indirectly interact with each other by burying their town at any stage of their game and letting other players explore and conquer those buried towns.As a new player starts a game (any of the maps) the buried town from other player is "injected" into the dungeons and with a few become an integral and challenging part of the dungeon.

How do I share or get other people buried map?Right now, the players will have to swap buried maps files between themselves manualy, but, in the near future we will implement a way to make that a seamless process thus further increasing the unexplored atmosphere of this feature.

To ease the initial process we have gathered a bunch of buried towns, those can be obtained clicking here.

Download this file and extract it in the 'bury' folder found in userFolder/.towns/bury/The folder should be automatically created when you launch the game for the first time after updating. As you start a new map, the game will randomly select one town from that folder and inject it to your newly formed dungeons.

What else?Beside this bury system which is the main feature of this patch, we have also added two new heroes, The Herbalist which relies on his nature allies to assist him in battle and Vechs, the bird miner, a hero that also summon creatures to his assistance such as Fwap'a Durp, a bat that makes your townies happier as they see him.

Cloth, sheep, wool and leather armors have been added as well, those should help the less tanky heroes survive in the deeper dungeons.

We have added a mod loader feature that will allow player to easily load and unload mods and easily arrange them without affecting the vanilla game files.

We have also added and improved many other things which can be found clicking here.

We hope you will find this patch interesting and fun to play. As always, criticism and suggestions are more than welcome!

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

Bit of a shame, was always a game I kept thinking I might consider buying if it ever came up at 80% off on a Steam sale. And I guess some people who have bought it, expecting to get a finished game eventually, aren't going to be too happy. Announcing a sequel at the same time is also a little callous. Oh well.

I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, as my thoughts on Samurai Space Bears should make clear, I am not a fan of "We can't finish this, we'll just make a new one". But, from this thread and posts I have seen, it sounds like Towns is already "complete" in the sense that it is playable and fun.

As for the dev: I do appreciate honesty, but he is kind of a moron if he felt that there was a guarantee of X sales/month on an incomplete indie game in a niche genre. And, honestly, that turns me off more than anything else

Time will tell how this is handled. But they have already laid the groundwork for rewarding existing customers for the sequel (hopefully it isn't just cosmetic DLC and/or a forum decal), which is the way to go. But I also can't help but think they will have the exact same problem, just with even less capitol as most of the customers already have copies.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

Based on that, any sequel would have to crowd-funded (because he won't 'work for free') so it's crazy to throw away all that good will like that.

Also I wonder if a lot of the issues stem back to the fact that the game was given away for about 70p in a bundle the minute the alpha was ready. That cash injection is nice when you're trying to get going, but but it stings when you can't then sell the game for £7 on Steam to the same people.

Didn't the devs sell the original for stupidly low prices in an alpha / greenlight bundle? It doesn't matter because it seems like their reputation is good and shot. Think about all the shit Obsidian gets, and their games are (besides Kotor2) eventually patched.

By the way, did 15% of the sales seem like a really small percentage to anyone else?

I do think that any project that tries to reproduce DF but make it better needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Eventually someone will get there, but Tarn is expecting it to take his entire lifetime, so it would need a similar or greater amount of man-hours (efficiency can decrease as size increases).

So if you want to equal it, it would not be unrealistic to expect six programmers to work for two years just on features. Add in god knows how much more for graphics. And then even more artists to create content for graphics. And then....

Feb 9, 2014, the three said they were abandoning development of the game due to burnout.

The development was passed to Florian Frankenberger, which based on the lastest post, he did so based on getting 15% of the revenue and was given sales information and their minimum sales projection for copies sold each month.

In the time he worked on getting a major update out after learning the source code, sales were rapidly dropping. To a point that Florian can not work full time on. He suggests the game be made Open Source.

Instead of some DLC or any other way to boost revenue (Steam sale, promo, get the press talking about it again), he mentions talk with one of the original devs about making Towns 2 and the advantages that come with any sequel (new code base) along with a source of new revenue.

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Seems fare. Hell I am always surprised how Natural Selection keeps putting out free updates at times. You wonder why the big devs charge for DLC and some updates, because new game sales dry up. To be fair I do not believe the devs here did enough to try to get sales back up. Florian is focused on coding while the owners are doing whatever they want while they get free sales checks for little work.

Florian joined at a bad time where sales were on their tail end and the devs put no more effort to promote it.

Towns sold 200k units by July 2013 and had $2m in gross revenue. Between the 3 devs they probably got to keep 50% of that for their own income. Enough to live on for a couple years, work on a new game and keep Towns updates here and there while promoting sales of it.

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

Didn't the devs sell the original for stupidly low prices in an alpha / greenlight bundle? It doesn't matter because it seems like their reputation is good and shot. Think about all the shit Obsidian gets, and their games are (besides Kotor2) eventually patched.

I can't remember what bundle it was in, but yes, I got Towns from an indie bundle or a humble bundle a long time ago, even before greenlight was a thing. Then when greenlight came out and it got through that process I got my Steam key.

"Halo is designed to make the player think "I look like that, I am macho sitting in my undies with my xbox""